The previous post, Halt! (or not), described the Turing Halting Problem, a fundamental limit on what computers can do, on what can be calculated by a program. Kurt Gödel showed that a very similar limit exists for any (sufficiently powerful) mathematical system.
This raises some obvious questions: What is calculation, exactly? What do we mean when we talk about a program or algorithm? (And how does all of this connect with the world of mathematics?)
Today we’re going to start exploring that.